Moorara Station on the Lower Darling, August 1896. It’s a moonless night. A dozen men, clothes turned inside out, faces and arms daubed with mud, oars muffled, row steadily across the river. Once on the opposite bank they wade silently towards the dark outline of a large riverboat moored in swampland.
 
At about 4 a.m in the morning, the boarders swiftly overwhelm the watchman. Someone reported that the forty scab shearers aboard “fell on their knees and begged for mercy.” An indignant Captain Dickson, plus the non-union labourers are hustled ashore into the hands of a waiting crowd of striking shearers.
 
On the spur of the moment, some of the exuberant boarding party pour kerosene on bags of chaff found in the hold and within minutes, flames are licking around the wheel house. Soon the 133-ton P.S Rodney - pride of Permewan Wright Company’s riverboat fleet, has burned to the waterline, drifts drunkenly, lurches and sinks with a hiss of steam.
 
And so, a rare casualty of inland piracy came to rest as a hulk on the bottom of the Darling River. The wreck came to encapsulate a tumultuous moment in the history of working class Australia. The central figure in this forgotten drama was a man of rare calibre – Scots immigrant William Guthrie Spence.

The humble backyard shed is usually where we park stuff and often , it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'. The Story Shed is the opposite - It's purposed to make our Australian faith stories both visible and accessible.  Over the past few years, it's been a work space that has steadily produced a flow of great yarns and they're all true! I've taken time to craft them carefully so you can just lift them off the shelf and set them to work at your place.  Why don't you open this blog and check out  the list of stories on my Outback Historian website and become a real live storyteller yourself?

Don't let them just gather dust.

​Why on earth would the man who was highly respected as a civil rights leader, cheered as a champion footballer, selected as the first indigenous State Governor, honoured with an MBE for his service to his people and knighted by the Queen, insist that his most important title was ‘Pastor’? 
 
It’s really intrigued me that the enormous publicity surrounding the two rounds of AFL football set aside in May to celebrate him, chose to call him only “ ____ Sir Douglas Nicholls’. Why the edit? Perhaps the humble descriptor ‘pastor’ was just too awkward for the hype.
  
That sent me searching for the reasons why the multi-talented Doug singled this out as the title that best described his career. Here’s what I discovered. 

​I was excited when a missing link in the fascinating story of Australia’s homegrown astronomer John Tebbutt surfaced this week. It’s an extraordinary lecture delivered to an audience of men at the YMCA in Windsor in 1878, where this world-renowned scientist detailed his conviction that the starry skies above our Great South Land shout the wisdom and genius of the Creator every night. It  was the product of fifty years close observation.
 
John Tebbutt was known for being meticulous in his search for truth and on that Monday night in July, nearly 150 years ago, he declared to an audience of young Australians in ringing tones, that the Author of the universe had visited our planet in none other than the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who had once majestically commanded the waves of Lake Galilee to be still.
 
I think 21st Century generations need to hear this brilliant scientist’s voice again. Click  Read More  to find the link to  my  original blog on John Tebbutt and also a selection of quotes from his lecture in 1878.

It’s 1918 and Brother John Consterdine is jogging steadily West out of Bourke in his sulky doing the rounds of a parish roughly the size of his home country, England. He’s got rations on board that should last him a couple of months. He is one of the young clergy known as the Bush Brothers who had answered a call to venture out to the very edges of settlement in NSW and Queensland.
 
Their university degrees weren’t guaranteed to win a hearing with station families or the shifting population of shearers, stockmen, well sinkers and fencers – mostly graduates from ‘The School of Hard Knocks.’ But, by nicknaming him ‘Brother Connie’, the bush people signalled they thought he wasn’t a half-bad bloke. Loneliness can make people inventive and Connie had turned the long tedious stretches through the Gidgea, Mulga and treeless salt pans of back country NSW into a rich university education of his own. He wrote,
    
When it is remembered that Australia is perhaps the only country in the world where a 1918 motor tyre may easily be punctured by a Paleolithic or Old Stone Age spear head, which in other countries would take deep digging to find and that these remains are fast disappearing, it will be easily seen how important and fascinating it is to collect what remains before it is too late.
​(Pictured are some of the Bush Brothers at their base in Dubbo.)

Our vast Southern continent lies safe beneath one of the most remarkable security blankets in human history. While Israelis crouch beneath the protection of the ‘Iron Dome’ that stands sentinel over their tiny country – the wide-spread Australian population rests confidently beneath the kindly ‘Mantle of Safety’ first spread over them by the visionary clergyman John Flynn, almost a century ago.
 
Every day of the year, 87 RFDS aircraft and team of pilots, nurses, doctors, counsellors, drivers and administrators stand ready to reach the farthest corner with the finest care. It’s a level of medical service unparalleled anywhere in the world. So many families from the west, including my own have reason to be deeply grateful for these mercy flights that save lives.  

On September 20th 1870, a small canoe was towed across the quiet lagoon of the tiny island of Nukapu in the Santa Cruz group and left to drift towards the schooner Southern Cross, anchored outside the reef. It carried the body of a man carefully wrapped in a mat and on his chest, a palm leaf with five knots. On the corpse were five wounds – seemingly one for each of five village men recently kidnapped by ‘blackbirders’ as slaves for the Queensland sugar plantations.
 
This reprisal was a double tragedy. First, because it was part of the sad 40-year chapter where more than 62,000 Kanakas were either enticed by false promises or taken by force to work as ‘indentured labourers’ in Australia’s North. Second, because the murdered man had worked tirelessly to create a positive future for the peoples of the myriad islands North East of Australia.

A brilliant linguist, John Coleridge Patteson learned twenty-three of the many Melanesian languages he met as he sailed thousands of kilometres of the Pacific. At 28 years old, the gifted Oxford scholar had been inspired to leave a comfortable English lifestyle to join Bishop Selwyn in the hazardous adventure of bringing the message of Jesus to the 2000 islands stretching from Papua New Guinea to Fiji in nearly a million sq kms of ocean. Strenuous travel over sixteen years led to bouts of malaria and exhaustion.

Over the last  year I have been in the studio recording the audiobook for Tell Me Another.  It has been a slow process but it is nearing  completion at last!   As we approach Australia Day, aware  of the controversies of recent years, I thought I'd  like to share  with you Chapter 7, relating my own experiences living alongside the indigenous people of Bourke and Dubbo.  We hope that the whole  audiobook will be available in the next few weeks.
​
Copy the link below and insert into your browser to listen to Chapter 7 of Tell Me Another.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14vIdbjyTb2CBJSlvvWKPyXrl4R85NieZ/view?usp=drive_link

“As I hold these bits of folded paper
I wonder what it is I keep them for.
A flimsy pen and ink connection
To a bloke who isn’t with us anymore.”
                                          Colin Buchanan
 
I heard my grandfather’s voice very clearly the other day, which was surprising since I’d never met him and his body had been laid to rest seventy years ago in a Maitland cemetery! In one of those quiet days after Christmas, as the old year shrivels away, I found myself in what used to be called ‘a brown study.’  That means you absent-mindedly drift into reflections on things past.
 
In this case memory was triggered by a three-page letter my widowed grandfather Jim Roe penned to his grand-daughter late in 1951. He wrote with a pretty neat hand considering he’d left school at 12 to join his father working in a coal mine under Newcastle Harbour at Stockton.

But the handwriting and lack of punctuation took second place to warmth of spirit that spilled minor doings of life around his weatherboard miner’s cottage in Telarah onto the yellowing page. He’d been following Nancye’s family’s road trip to Sydney, praying over every stage. He knew neighbourhood kids by name, reporting with interest on the threads and scissors Joyce Baldwin had shown him that her mother had searched out for her new sewing basket. He knew she’d got all her sums right as well and might even do better than her brother Herbert.
 
I suspect my grandfather’s own lack of education made him urge the kids around him to make the most of their schooling.
 
Emphysema from his lifetime of work in dark mines weakened his lungs but hadn’t dampened his spirits nor his faith. His gift for telling entertaining stories drew children around him in the street on his way home from work. He brought the Bible to life for scores of kids in Cessnock and Maitland in a way that stayed with them for a lifetime.
 
I knew from my Dad that his mother and father were chronically kind, in spite of being poor.  So, it’s no surprise to hear Jim tell how friends had gifted him a package of fresh fish for his lunch or that neighbour Mrs Baldwin had insisted on coming over to wash all his linen and scrub his floors while he entertained the baby.  Others were picking him up for a fishing holiday weekend.
 
Standing on the brink of a new year, Jim Roe’s humble letter spoke to his grandson out of the past, reminding me to appreciate the simple things, to be thankful for daily bread from the Father’s hand and to bring life into the lives of those around me.
 
Thanks Grandfather. I hope I can report I’ve done the same when we meet next.

”Not all of us can do great things but we can do small things with great love.”
Mother Teresa
 

“If you want to commend your gospel to men, first of all do something for them they understand.” (Rev. John Flynn’s favourite saying.)
 
A century ago, ‘Tragedy Corner’ was an undefined space where the borders of South Australia, NSW and Queensland and the 5000 km long dingo fence, jostled each other. Scorching winds, summer heat and the fitful flows in the Diamantina River and Cooper’s Creek had made it a graveyard for exploring parties like those of Charles Sturt and Burke and Wills.
 
It was the tragic toll it took on families that caught the attention of the Rev. John Flynn in the war years, 1914-18. Twice he had received anonymous letters containing the white feather suggesting he was a coward for not going to the War. But he believed the remote Inland was his battlefield and threw himself recklessly into the effort to raise money for a hospital and recruit high grade nurses for the tiny settlement of Birdsville. The conquest of Tragedy Corner had begun.